Day 8 – Prequel to the Reluctant Superhero

So this is my piece of writing for day eight. Not very long, but then again most of them aren’t.

I stood in line with the rest of the ten-year-olds. My hands were shaking and my mouth felt dry. Everything in the room seemed like it was conspiring against me – the old men with disapproving glances, the stark whiteness of the building, the snooty stares of the others. Today we would choose whether to be superheroes or villains in the human world.

This system had formed many years ago, when the humans had believed in magic. They needed superheroes, but they needed villains as well, to balance it all out. And plus, humans seemed to like villains. They were always talking about them in the news more than they talked about the heroes. Now that humans didn’t believe in magic, though, we had to be undercover. Incognito. When we switched worlds, our wings disappeared, our ears became rounded, our eyes lost their slants and our clothes changed. Human in every way.

I was almost at the front of the line. The villains went to the left to start training, and the superheroes went to the right. The villains were admired most of all. People said that the superheroes were just a bunch of suck-ups. I didn’t know if it was true or not.

I craned my neck to see what was at the front of the line. Could I just choose? Was there maybe a test? I didn’t know. At the start of the line, the ten-year-old spoke to a hovering imp for a few minutes, then branched off into villain or superhero. But I couldn’t see what was beyond each door. What would training be like?

With a shock, I realised I was at the front. The imp took my hand and stamped something on to it. VILLAIN.